Trigger Warning

Balthasar said only, ‘It soon will be. We have only a handful of minutes left. It is well that I have made provision for this day.’ He held the fish-oil lamp up high, and walked back into the cottage.

Farfal followed his father into the tiny dwelling, which consisted of one large room and, at the far end of the dwelling, a locked door. It was to this door that Balthasar walked. He put down the lamp in front of it, took a key from around his neck and unlocked the door.

Farfal’s mouth fell open.

He said only, ‘The colours.’ Then, ‘I dare not go through.’

‘Idiot boy,’ said his father. ‘Go through, and tread carefully as you do.’ And then, when Farfal made no move to walk, his father pushed him through the door, and closed it behind them.

Farfal stood there, blinking at the unaccustomed light.

‘As you apprehend,’ said his father, resting his hands on his capacious stomach and surveying the room they found themselves in, ‘this room does not exist temporally in the world you know. It exists, instead, over a million years before our time, in the days of the last Remoran Empire, a period marked by the excellence of its lute music, its fine cuisine, and also the beauty and compliance of its slave class.’

Farfal rubbed his eyes, and then looked at the wooden casement standing in the middle of the room, a casement through which they had just walked, as if it were a door. ‘I begin to perceive,’ he said, ‘why it is that you were so often unavailable. For it seems to me that I have seen you walk through that door into this room many times and never wondered about it, merely resigned myself to the time that would pass until you returned.’

Balthasar the Tardy began then to remove his clothes of dark sacking until he was naked, a fat man with a long white beard and cropped white hair, and then to cover himself with brightly coloured silken robes.

‘The sun!’ exclaimed Farfal, peering out of the room’s small window. ‘Look at it! It is the orange-red of a fresh-stirred fire! Feel the heat it gives!’ And then he said, ‘Father. Why has it never occurred to me to ask you why you spent so much time in the second room of our one-room cottage? Nor to remark upon the existence of such a room, even to myself?’

Balthasar twisted the last of the fastenings, covering his remarkable stomach with a silken covering that crawled with embroideries of elegant monsters. ‘That might,’ he admitted, ‘have been due in part to Empusa’s Invocation of Incuriosity.’ He produced a small black box from around his neck, windowed and barred, like a tiny room, barely large enough to hold a beetle. ‘This, when properly primed and invoked, keeps us from being remarked upon. Just as you were not able to wonder at my comings and goings, so neither do the folk in this time and place marvel at me, nor at anything I do that is in any wise contrary to the mores and customs of the Eighteenth and Last Greater Remoran Empire.’

‘Astonishing,’ said Farfal.

‘It matters not that the sun has gone out, that in a matter of hours, or at most weeks, all life on Earth will be dead, for here and at this time I am Balthasar the Canny, merchant to the sky-ships, dealer in antiquities, magical objects, and marvels – and here you, my son, will stay. You will be, to all who wonder about your provenance, simply and purely my servant.’

‘Your servant?’ said Farfal the Unfortunate. ‘Why can I not be your son?’

‘For various reasons,’ stated his father, ‘too trivial and minor even to warrant discussion at this time.’ He hung the black box from a nail in the corner of the room. Farfal thought he saw a leg or head, as if of some beetle-like creature, waving at him from inside the little box, but he did not pause to inspect it. ‘Also because I have a number of sons in this time, that I have fathered upon my concubines, and they might not be pleased to learn of another. Although, given the disparity in the dates of your birth, it would be over a million years before you could inherit any wealth.’

‘There is wealth?’ asked Farfal, looking at the room he was in with fresh eyes. He had spent his life in a one-roomed cottage at the end of time, at the bottom of a small hill, surviving on the food his father could net in the air – usually only seabirds or flying lizards, although on occasion other things had been caught in the nets: creatures who claimed to be angels, or great self-important cockroach-like things with high metal crowns, or huge bronze-coloured jellies. They would be taken from the netting, and then either thrown back into the air, or eaten, or traded with the few folk that passed that way.

His father smirked and stroked his impressive white beard like a man petting an animal. ‘Wealth indeed,’ he said. ‘There is much call in these times for pebbles and small rocks from the End of the Earth: there are spells, cantrips, and magical instruments for which they are almost irreplaceable. And I deal in such things.’